Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.

You can read the full story of the new page here, but BoomTown thought it might also be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo (YHOO) front page has evolved since 1994.

Incredibly, that was 15 years ago.

Personally, I like 1994 and 1995, which were clean and clear with big font sizes, due to Yahoo positioning itself as a directory of the Web, although the 1995 logo and swirly buttons are wacky.

The one from 1997 is also an improvement, in the same list theme.

But in 2000, the whole page suddenly started bloating badly, with too much color and too many links.

Weight gain continued in 2002, and the page got even more colorfully confusing with ever-smaller font sizes in 2004.

The 2006 version was, thankfully, much simpler, but still a packed-out mess.

That new incarnation from the Silicon Valley icon, which you can see above, is a more back to the basics in style.

The latest launch, which Yahoo had previously said was coming in the fall, rolls out today for the hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. and will be extended to France, the U.K., Germany and India later this week.

Here are the screenshots of all the Yahoo pages in order, from 1994 to 2006 (click on the images to make them larger, and please excuse some blurriness–I got these shots from Yahoo):

1994:

1995:

1997:

2000:

2002:

2004:

2006:

Yahoo’s top mobile exec, Marco Boerries, is departing Yahoo, according to an internal email obtained by BoomTown that he sent to some staffers on Sunday.

I have also confirmed Boerries’s departure with company insiders familiar with the situation.

In a post Monday on a management restructuring at Yahoo (YHOO) that new CEO Carol Bartz is likely to unveil to the company this week–sources tell me it is now set to be announced internally tomorrow–I noted that Boerries was one of the more likely high-level execs to go.

He has been the EVP for the Connected Device Division at Yahoo for four years, coming to the company in 2005 with the acquisition of VerdiSoft. He also had earlier sold another software company to Sun Microsystems (JAVA) in 1999.

Nonetheless, many inside Yahoo expected him to go with the changing of leadership recently, after almost two years of turmoil at Yahoo. Like many, he reportedly wanted to leave earlier, but felt loyalty to former CEO Jerry Yang.

I wrote:

Boerries, a talented but more freewheeling exec under Yang, is another question all together. Already wealthy from selling several companies, the entrepreneurial exec is most often mentioned by sources as someone unlikely to stick around, especially if Bartz tries to rein him in more. (In addition, Boerries has family issues requiring that he spend a lot of time in his native Germany.)”

In his email, Boerries did not mention Bartz, but did indeed mention his personal issues.

“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!,” Boerries wrote, attributing his departure in an email titled “Personal Update,” to issues related to his family.

Because of that, Boerries has more recently been splitting his time between Northern California and Hamburg.

In the note to staff, he also noted all the successes Yahoo has had with its mobile and other device efforts.

It’s unclear what the impact of Boerries’s departure on Yahoo’s Connected Life unit will be.

But it seems more likely than not that Bartz will cut back, given that it is harder to monetize now and also because Yahoo does not have its own device, as both Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) do, which might help it create a more virtuous ecosystem.

Still, Yahoo has some extremely interesting products in the mobile space and, as is typical, really well done, such as many parts of its oneConnect service for smartphones.

In addition, Boerries unveiled a pretty interesting Connected TV effort at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, although this is also an area still struggling to find a lucrative business model.

Here’s a video of me interviewing Boerries, as well as Yang and outgoing President Sue Decker, about Connected TV:

And here is the Boerries goodbye memo in its entirety:

From: Marco Boerries
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009 12:06:30 PM
Subject: Personal Update

Marco

Yahoo is losing yet another top executive–Toby Coppel, its EVP and managing director of Europe and Canada, is set to announce today that he is stepping down.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

Coppel’s job covers the major Western European markets (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia), as well as Canada, for Yahoo (YHOO).

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group, which put him in charge of all revenues for the division. Riley, who came to Yahoo a decade ago, was previously the head of Yahoo’s Small & Medium Business Group in the U.S.

Coppel, who came to Yahoo with former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel in 2001, has run European operations for Yahoo for 18 months. And most of his time has been spent restructuring and making massive cuts.

The unit will have about one-third of the people as when Coppel arrived by the first quarter, after the current round of layoffs. And, if you include Yahoo’s sale of the comparison-shopping site Kelkoo last week, the cuts total 45 percent of its former size.

Coppel also shepherded the move of Yahoo’s European HQ to Switzerland from higher-priced London. Most of its top managers are now located there, although London remains an important Yahoo outpost, since it is the largest online ad market in Europe.

Coppel will remain with Yahoo until the end of the first quarter to ensure a smooth transition. He told BoomTown in an interview that his future plans are undetermined, except to welcome his third child into the world very soon.

“I have been transitioning our European business, restructuring it and making it stronger, as Yahoo is moving to product development on a global platform,” said Coppel. “While there is more work, there is now a strong team in place, focused on going forward and it needs to spread its wings.”

Coppel noted, although a lot of his tenure was occupied by restructuring the European unit, that “we have taken display advertising market share from MSN, AOL and other competitors in almost every one of our European markets in 2008 and we grew our Canadian business over 50 percent this year.”

And, indeed, Yahoo’s online display advertising business is stronger in Europe, although subject to the same vicious economic downturn that has hit the U.S. market.

In addition, Yahoo–and everyone else–lags well behind Google (GOOG) in the more lucrative search business in Europe, even more so than in the U.S., forcing competitors like Yahoo to streamline to compete.

That has meant layoffs, but also re-architecting Yahoo’s product development toward a global model to cut costs and also getting rid of some noncore assets like Kelkoo.

It was revealed last week that Kelkoo was sold to a U.K.-based private equity firm called Jamplant, at a reported discount from what Yahoo paid for it–$576 million–in 2004.

Now that all these kinds of major changes were made, Coppel said, it seemed a good time for him to go too.

“My value add-was not what it was going forward,” said Coppel, who noted that several layers of management in Europe had been collapsed in his tenure. “If we are streamlining and we mean it, it has to also start at the top.”

Here’s the internal Yahoo memo from President Sue Decker about the stepping down of Yahoo European head Toby Coppel, which BoomTown wrote about here.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

Coppel’s job covers the major Western European markets (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia), as well as Canada, for Yahoo (YHOO).

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group.

Here’s the memo:

From: Sue Decker
To: XXXX
Sent: Thu Nov 27 09:02:28 2008
Subject: Yahoo! Europe & Canada update

Sue

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

Then again, this is Google (GOOG), so you know they love to talk, because they are super-duper smart, I am told.

I will be posting video later, but thus far: A roomful of press in Building 43 at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif. Tasty snacks, as expected, but unusually caloric (many tiny pastries, heavy cream, very small amounts of fruit).

First up: Sundar Pichal, Chrome honcho!

Google’s VP Product Management, who rode herd on this project to create the search giant’s own piece of software to navigate the Internet, apologizes for the snafu that resulted in this announcement being made a day early.

Google Fedexed a comic book it is using to talk about the technical aspects of Chrome to a Germany-based blogger too early.

Ooops, the Big Brains of Google jinxed by some mailing room goof and express mail! How deliciously ironic is that?

Now, Pichal talks about a bunch of info that has been previously released about Chrome being built on WebKit, being available in 100 countries and being open source (a new open-source project launching today is called Chromium).

As to why Google makes a browser? ‘”We live on the Web,” said Pichal.

Um, doesn’t Google actually own the Internet, and we are all just serfs on its vast lands?

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

A few months ago BoomTown was in Berlin and visited a number of Internet companies there, including studiVZ, which I called “the Facebook of Germany” in the video posted below of my visit there.

Ooops!

As it turns out, that is apparently the illegal way to describe it, at least according to Facebook itself, which sued the German company in a California court last Friday, accusing it of making a “knock-off” of the popular social networking site.

That includes having a German version of Facebook’s popular Wall and other similar features. At least studiVZ is red, while Facebook is blue!

The name studiVZ is an abbreviation of the German word for students’ directory. Its tagline is “Bist Du schon drin?,” which translates to “Are you already there?”

Facebook has been trying to break into the German market for months now, as part of an aggressive international expansion.

But its efforts have been dwarfed by studiVZ, which was founded in 2005 and has been expanding throughout Europe. studiVZ now has 10 million users, mostly in German-speaking countries.

It also has a site for high-school students called schülerVZ and another for nonstudents called meinVZ.

Thus, a lawsuit from Facebook, which just settled a lawsuit with another startup called ConnectU (Winklevoss!) that accused Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing its original idea for a social networking site!

This just drips with irony, doesn’t it?

In any case, in its lawsuit, Facebook said it is “seeking to end studiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.”

Oh, German users aren’t confused–they just seem to like studiVZ better.

So much so that the company was bought last year by an investor, the large German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, for $112 million.

In response to the Facebook lawsuit, studiVZ said it had not yet been served with the California lawsuit and could not comment in detail.

Except it did manage to issue a statement that the “claims are without merit.”

Apparently, studiVZ is also trying to block the suit in German court too, creating what amounts to an international SuperPoking incident (called a gruscheln on studiVZ).

“Now that Facebook, despite trying hard, has not been successful in the German market, the company seeks to obstruct studiVZ through court action,” said Marcus Riecke, CEO of studiVZ. “Their strategy appears to be: If you can’t beat them, sue them.”

Added Riecke: “There are numerous social networks. Facebook was not the first and certainly isn’t the only one. By attempting to harm studiVZ through a meritless California lawsuit, Facebook is arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly over social networking sites that the facts show it does not deserve.”

In the video below, I talk to Dennis Bemmann, one of two founders of studiVZ, as well Michael Brehm. They run the company together in a troika with Riecke.

Notice how they try not to cringe when I call their site the Facebook of Germany, and also when Bemmann takes pains at the end to say that there are a lot of things alike all over the Web.

Like studiVZ and Facebook, say?

Here’s the video (sorry about calling it studio so much and not just studi–but my German stinks!):

I have no idea, nor do I know why Burda broke out into song either–how much do you have to love a media mogul willing to do that?

But I got it all on video and a whole lot more on the last day of the pre-Davos European gathering focused on digital issues and innovation.

(And here is a post by European serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, who apparently thinks his video shows that Accel Partners’ Simon Levene and I were not impressed enough by Campbell.)

In any case, DLD’s motto was: “Uploading the 21st Century.” And while it did not quite do that, there were definitely a lot of interesting moments I captured for your viewing pleasure.

Along with Campbell (who was supposed to appear on a panel on Africa, but did not) and a singing Burda, the video features clips from two sessions today.

The first was titled “Exploding Media” and included: pundit Clay Shirky riffing on flash mobs; a very funny clip of kids talking about television (made by Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg); Google’s Marissa Mayer noting that Google will still not be in the content business; Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz discussing Yahoo’s plans to de-focus on making original content; and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis advising old media to just ask WWGD? (What would Google do?).

Another session on the video features the founders of the genetics-focused social-networking company 23andMe–Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Esther Dyson–answering questions about fears people have about learning too much about DNA.

Here is the video (and now I am off to Hamburg to visit Xing, a business social-networking company):

The three-day conference focuses on digital innovation, science and culture. It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

I was here to interview Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. In our session this afternoon, we talked about digital tools to improve reporting on human-rights abuses, the situation in China for U.S. Web companies like Yahoo and Google, along with what techies can do to help in this important arena.

I also hung around the conference and schmoozed, Eurostyle!, with a lot of folks, including Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis and Vardi.

There is also some video from an interesting social-networking panel, featuring Matt Cohler of Facebook, Lars Hinrichs of Xing and Joanna Shields of Bebo.

Added bonus: I also got the no-comment-hand-over-camera move from Facebook’s Brandee Barker, but a promise of German beer!

Here’s the video:

I am now at the DLD conference in Munich, which is put on by Hubert Burda Media, a gathering that has become one of Europe’s most interesting in recent years.

The three-day DLD–which stands for Digital, Life, Design–focuses on digital innovation, science and culture and has the most cosmopolitan audience of any conference out there.

It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

It is interesting to be here to garner a lot of different viewpoints from outside the U.S., and I will be visiting a lot of German Web start-ups over the next week.

There is also a lot of Olympic-level schmoozing, of course, since there are precious few such events in Europe compared to the conference-crazy U.S.

There are also, of course, a lot of the usual suspects from the States and especially Silicon Valley.

So far this morning, I have run into folks like former Microsoftie Linda Stone, Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz, writer and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Facebook’s Matt Cohler and, yes, Martha Stewart (who needs no introduction).

I am also here to interview onstage for DLD today Kenneth Roth (pictured here), longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, which investigates, reports on and seeks to curb human-rights abuses in some 70 countries.

To say I am out of my league in interviewing such a serious and substantive figure is an understatement, especially given that I spend all my time contemplating the monetization of widgets (to be more specific, the non-monetization), the fate of content on the Web and the exact date the hype of social networking will end.

Still, I will give it my best effort and perhaps focus on the use of digital tools to get information and stories of heinous injustices out worldwide. After all, the Web has to be more than SuperPoking and dumb online videos on cats skateboarding.

Our session is aptly named: “Inconvenient Stories.”

My favorite kind.

Video, of course, to follow.